Afghanistan's Spaceman: History Won
There is a documentary that Elham Ehsas did not mean to make.
Afghanistan's Spaceman: History Won
There is a documentary that Elham Ehsas did not mean to make. He was researching something else entirely when he found the thread — Afghanistan sent a man to space in 1988, Abdul Ahad Mohmand, a cosmonaut who orbited Earth for nine days aboard a Soviet mission, and almost nobody knows his name. Ehsas pulled on that thread. *Forgotten Spaceman*, premiering at Locarno, is what came out the other end: part accidental archive project, part personal reckoning, part act of defiance against the version of Afghanistan that the rest of the world decided was the only version worth telling.
The film exists because a story was buried. Not lost — buried. There is a difference, and Ehsas knows it. Afghanistan's history of scientific achievement, of cosmonauts and engineers and ambition that predates forty years of war in the Western imagination, did not disappear. It was simply never repeated. Ehsas, London-based, actor by training, has a family connection to the story that he discusses carefully, the way you discuss something that changes the shape of your own history once you know it. The film carries that weight without performing it.
This is what documentary can do that no other form quite manages: it finds the fact that reconfigures everything adjacent to it. You think you know a place, a people, a period — and then someone shows you a photograph of a man in a spacesuit, and the entire frame shifts.
Elsewhere in the week's cinema noise: the *Jurassic World Rebirth* sequel has lost Gareth Edwards to creative differences, which is the industry's polite way of saying the machine won and the filmmaker blinked. Edwards made *Monsters*, *Godzilla*, *Rogue One* — he understands scale, restraint, the architecture of dread. Universal will replace him. The sequel will still get made. It will probably be fine in the way that everything Universal makes is fine, which is to say forgettable by the following weekend.
Barack Obama improvising lines in an HBO Larry David sketch, blaming Larry David for the tan suit incident, ranting about ketchup — this is either the most humanising thing a former president has ever done or the most calculated, and at this point the distinction no longer matters. The clip will circulate. People will love it. It will work.
The verdict this week belongs to Ehsas. A man nobody was looking for, a film nobody commissioned, a history everyone forgot on purpose. The most interesting cinema is always the kind that makes you slightly angry you didn't already know.
